BBDC – Dash Mobile Launching App January 2010 in US & Canada

RIM dropped the bomb during the keynote showing off Dash Mobile for BlackBerry. They are focusing on crowd sourcing data that would give you live traffic and an ETA (estimated time of arrival) for your trip using data collected from multiple BlackBerrys.

The app even lets you simply send an SMS within two clicks to tell meeting attendees that you will be late. They will also be launching with an API that lets other developers tap into the application to get estimates for traffic and ETA of your trip.

Since the data is crowd sourced they need to wait until the app hits critical mass before it truly becomes useful. Should be interesting to see what they have to release in January.

Don’t forget that there is still an active (though steadily shrinking) user base for Dash’s in car GPS product that’s been feeding data on top of the Navteq data that they use as well as the basis for their recommendations / real time traffic.